As the old adage goes: no one is supposed to ignore the law! This precaution is even truer in the case of health and safety or environmental regulations, since the safety of employees, respect for the environment and, ultimately, the company’s image are at stake.
➡️ The main challenge is to maintain an exhaustive regulatory watch in these areas. It’s a very time-consuming job. And, as HSE manager, you also have to manage your teams, carry out inspections, take part in meetings, draw up reports, and so on.
➡️ In addition, understanding legal texts has become very complex due to the construction of texts and legal jargon. Do you have an entire team dedicated to this? What’s more, ideally, its members should be legally literate, and have the technical resources and time to analyze the texts and then pass on instructions to the people concerned to comply with their requirements.
➡️ The number of legal and regulatory texts is exponential. The lines corresponding to the requirements of each text are displayed in an Excel file, making them difficult to read and increasing the risk of error!
However, keeping abreast of regulations and ensuring that your company complies with them is the cornerstone of any health and safety strategy, and an essential prerequisite for ISO 45001 and ISO 14001 certification.
While many continue to strain their eyes over the many lines of excel spreadsheets, some have decided to switch to a digital solution, one like NV Compliance, for example.
What are the main benefits of optimized monitoring with a digital solution?
- time saving
- fewer accidents
- a shared safety culture
We’ll tell you all about it below…
What is a regulatory watch?
You can find a more detailed definition of regulatory watch here, but to sum up: regulatory watch means identifying the regulatory texts applicable to your organization, and keeping abreast of changes and new developments in your sector.
Once this monitoring has been carried out, an assessment of compliance will need to be carried out, followed by actions to bring into line the points where deviations from the regulations have been identified.
Step 1: Initial compliance audit
➡️ Setting up the process:
Working meetings between Novallia’s engineers and legal experts and customer and user contacts.
➡️ Establishment of regulatory texts applicable to the company or activity :
Novallia’s outsourced team collects the themes and the list of texts applicable to the company.
➡️ Areas and themes
The texts in the regulatory watch tool are sorted into large sections called “fields”. Regulatory areas range from Environment to Occupational Health and Safety, Energy, HR law, and for Africa: customs, banking and food safety law.
The crucial part of this stage is the compilation of the texts applicable to the organization, which will be allocated to the Customized Base within the NV Compliance web application.
This list will either be drawn up by Novallia following a questionnaire or a visit to the company’s site, or transmitted by the customer.
Step 2: Analysis and explanation of regulatory texts and identification of compliance requirements
Each applicable text is explained and broken down into small sections called regulatory requirements. These “requirements” are small parts of the whole text whose conformity will be checked.
This breakdown is accompanied by comments written by Novallia’s team of regulatory experts (legal experts and HSE engineers), to make it easier to understand the texts and capture important information more quickly, even for someone with no knowledge of the field.
Novallia’s little plus :
👉 we can add to our text database any requirements you may need: ISO 45001, ISO 14001, ISO 9001 audit reports and action plans, …
These first two steps constitute the regulatory watch itself. This is a good basis on which to build your QHSE policy, but is of no fundamental use if you don’t check that your site or activity complies with these legal texts.
Stage 3: Conformity assessment
This 3rd step will compare your company, activities or projects with the regulatory texts to find out whether your organization is compliant or non-compliant, and on what points.
As with text preparation, this stage requires a great deal of time, knowledge and resources.
To help you save time on compliance assessments, Novallia’s teams will assist you in carrying out these assessments, with a visit to your facilities and equipment, and a detailed analysis of the associated documents.
Novallia’s little extras :
👉 Novallia’s teams have over 15 years’ experience in assessing the conformity of industrial sites, and are quick to identify non-conformities and areas requiring special attention.
👉 NV Compliance offers conformity assessments by full text or by requirements, or by customized audit grids (valid, for example, for a series of positions or agencies with similarities).
Step 4: Draw up a compliance action plan.
Once the conformity assessment is complete, you’ll have identified a series of requirements that your organization will need to work on to regain compliance.
➡️ For each non-conformity identified, you can then prepare an action. And all these actions will be grouped together in a detailed action plan.
Novallia’s little plus
👉 within the application, each non-conformity can be associated with a specific action plan with a responsible person, a deadline for resolution and periodic reminders
Step 5: Keep abreast of new laws and regulations
Each new text entering your field of application is announced on the web application and broken down into requirements.
You’ll then have to go back to steps 3 and 4: assess your compliance and draw up an action plan to resolve any non-conformities.
To conclude
The advantages of digitizing regulatory/legal intelligence and compliance are clear to see: time-saving, efficiency gains, traceability of actions, tracking of action plans, consolidation of compliance in one place, etc.
Now it’s time to choose THE right tool and services for your business. At Novallia, over the last 15 years we have developed a solution that combines the expertise of our regulatory and engineering teams with the use of a high-performance web application, NV Compliance.
The advantages of our NV Compliance web application :
👉 On the welcome dashboard, a set of indicators tells you how far your compliance has progressed. You can easily monitor your compliance and communicate it to stakeholders by customizing your reports and KPIs: breakdown by site, by group of sites, by country, comparison by date, export in different formats,
👉 ISO standard texts can be integrated into the app. So you can monitor the progress of your certification tasks.
👉 your group, parent company or suppliers have their own requirements, no worries either, they can be integrated into the monitoring and compliance web app.
In short, save time in your regulatory monitoring and compliance: contact us!